Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (13 page)

There were two main racecourses in Rome, the Circus Maximus beneath the Palatine Hill and the smaller Circus Flaminius in the Campus Martius (the Field of Mars, a large area originally used for military training to the north of the city, but now largely covered with public buildings). Chariots were usually drawn by four horses, but on occasion up to ten; novices drove two-horse chariots. They waited in twelve starting boxes, charged down a long straight, maneuvered sharply and dangerously around a cluster of three turning posts, galloped back, turned again, and so on for seven laps. Races at the Circus Maximus, whose track was almost a quarter of a mile long, lasted about fifteen minutes.

Charioteers were hugely popular. Many of them began their careers as slaves, but bought their freedom with their prize money. They could earn giddyingly large sums: one of the most successful was a Spaniard from Lusitania, one Appuleius Diocles, who styled himself as the “most eminent of charioteers” and drove teams of chariot horses for twenty-four years. During this time he ran in more than four thousand races and came first nearly fifteen hundred times. He won a staggering total of
35,863,120 sesterces, although presumably some of this was payable to his faction management, and he earned himself a place among the superrich of ancient Rome.

Of course, few charioteers were as successful as Diocles. The twenty-two-year-old Eutyches was obviously not much good at his job. He died young, and the epitaph on his gravestone admits, touchingly, that

Chariot racing was reserved for professionals, and young men from the upper classes were excluded from entering and driving their own chariots. The more raffish emperors might encourage an exception. Nero, predictably, allowed men and women of both the equestrian and senatorial orders to take part in the games whether as stage performers or as gladiators and charioteers. In Dio Cassius’ day, audiences were able to sit and watch members of Rome’s great families “standing down there below them [in the arena or onstage] and doing things some of which they formerly would not even watch when performed by others.”

This kind of permissiveness was not on offer under the Flavian emperors. In any event, Hadrian’s days as a tearaway were over and, even if he watched the thrills of the circus with a certain envy, his attention was now focused on climbing the lower rungs of the political ladder. While he enjoyed his distractions, from now onward he never let himself be distracted from the main business of ambition.

In
A
.
D
. 94 Hadrian was able to enjoy one of Domitian’s most extravagant innovations—the Capitoline Games, founded eight years previously to mark the rebuilding of the great temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol and staged every four years. They were founded on the Greek model and were evidence that the Hellenizing ideas of Nero were
not dead. They attracted the disapproval of old-fashioned Roman moralists, who were shocked that the city’s most sacred precinct and its divine custodian should be sullied by non-Roman rites. Not so Hadrian. Whatever else he made of the Flavian regime, these games will have pleased a young man who was more Greek than the Greeks.

Everything was done on the grandest scale. Rather as with today’s Olympic Games, vast sums of money were spent on specially designed buildings. The Stadium in the Campus Martius held seats for about fifteen thousand spectators (its arcades were soon given over to brothels) and was reserved for athletic contests. Not far away, the Odeum was erected for musical performances. For centuries these were among the city’s most admired buildings (they have since completely disappeared).

The games featured chariot racing, gymnastics, and athletics (unusually, there was even a foot race for girls); also poetry, music, singing, and oratory. The emperor himself presided, wearing a purple toga in the Greek manner, with a golden crown on his head featuring images of Jupiter, his wife, Juno, and daughter, Minerva. This first year there were fifty-two contestants for the Greek poetry prize alone.

Competition was fierce and the games soon became very popular throughout the empire. They sent a powerful message of the high value that the government accorded to Hellenic culture. It was a message with which Hadrian heartily concurred, and to which he would return later in his life.

To modern eyes, the most disgraceful aspect of Roman culture was the gladiatorial display. Fights in the arena were called
munera
(literally, a
munus
meant a service, favor, or gift), and had nothing to do with the
ludi
. Slaves and criminals, complemented by a few volunteers, fought one another in costly spectacles.

The origins of this bloodthirsty practice are uncertain, but what evidence we have suggests that it began with sacrificial combats at the funerals of great men. By the end of the Republic, a century before Hadrian’s day, educated Romans such as Cicero found the whole business vulgar and boring, but acknowledged that watching men trying to kill one another was a training in physical courage.

Gladiatorial shows were so expensive that even emperors had to ration the number of days devoted to them in a year. In Rome, they were usually held in March and December, but also at other times when the emperor chose to celebrate particular events. Thousands of gladiators might take part in imperial spectacles, although other promoters were restricted to no more than 120 pairs. Small teams of gladiators toured the provinces.

Fighters wore different types of armor; some were heavily armed, whereas others, such as the Thraeces, or Thracians, were provided with a light shield and sickle. The most distinctive gladiator was the
retiarius;
he simply wore a tunic and was equipped with a net, a trident, and a dagger.

An ingenious recent calculation allows us to estimate a total of four hundred gladiatorial venues across the empire. Perhaps on average two shows a year were staged at each of them, featuring teams of about thirty gladiators, who would each fight twice. This would have meant about twelve thousand fighters in total. Perhaps four thousand were killed annually, a death rate of one in six per show. Numbers were made up by recruitment, signifying an annual throughput of sixteen thousand men.

In the public eye, gladiators were extremely sexy; they were the ultimate in masculinity, and their charms were much enhanced by their mortality. Juvenal evokes an upper-class woman’s fondness for “her Sergius,” who had

The Romans liked animals, and especially liked to see them killed. With considerable difficulty, elephants, bears, crocodiles, ostriches, leopards, even polar bears and seals (another first for Nero) were caught, transported to Rome, and trained to do tricks or fight against each other. Elephants were particularly popular, being attributed with a humanlike
intelligence: Pliny the Elder claims that one beast, beaten for failing to learn a trick, was discovered at night practicing what he had to do.

As well as gladiators, the program for a
munus
would usually include one or more of three spectacles—armed men fighting animals, animals driven to fight each other, and unarmed condemned criminals exposed to starved carnivores. The first of these was not unlike hunting in the open, and so may have interested a keen huntsman such as Hadrian. Martial, with his unerring eye for the unpleasant, describes the death of a pregnant wild sow; a
bestiarius
wounded her in the stomach and, as she expired, a piglet ran out of her into the arena.

The government devoted much attention to, and spent resources on, the
munera
and the
ludi
. The powers of the people to vote politicians into office had been steadily whittled away, but emperors knew that their authority lay in part with popular support in and around the capital. State provision of subsidized grain and free public entertainment helped to ensure the loyalty of the masses. Juvenal’s sharp eyes saw this with poetic clarity. He noted that citizens no longer had a vote to sell, or even the wish to have one.

It was not surprising, then, that the Flavians sought to secure their new dynasty by a massive building commission. Within a few years of assuming the purple in 69, Vespasian began construction of the Flavian Amphitheater, or the Colosseum as we know it, still Rome’s most striking and unforgettable monument. Its seating capacity was around fifty thousand, so only a minority of the city’s inhabitants could squeeze in at one particular time. Although tickets for all public entertainments were free, gaining entry to a major show at the Colosseum must have entailed some string pulling.

The seating was arranged hierarchically in steeply serried ranks and,
when the amphitheater was full, was a representation in small of Roman society. In the front row of the lowest tier, spaces were reserved for members of the Senate and for state priestesses, the Vestal Virgins. Next came places for the
equites
and so on to high up in the top rows, where slaves and women were allowed to sit. For the emperor himself was reserved an imperial box, or
pulvinar
(originally a cushioned couch on which images of the gods were displayed).

In 80, the Colosseum was at last ready. By that time Vespasian was dead and Titus had succeeded him. The new emperor opened the building with a spectacular celebration. One hundred days were set aside for an extravagant series of combats and animal hunts. The program, if uninterrupted, would surely have been too much for the most diehard enthusiast for slaughter and must have been broken up into manageable groups of days over the year.

Hadrian was only five years old when the Flavian Amphitheater first opened its doors and would not have been taken to the more bloodthirsty events. But it was a great moment in the history of the dynasty, and, as an associate of the Ulpian clan, which was high in favor at court, he would surely have been taken to some ceremony or other over which the emperor presided, or perhaps to a comparatively “safe” spectacle, such as the horse racing. Later, as a young man he had ample opportunity to experience the complete gallery of horrors.

Another kind of horror awaited Hadrian on the public stage. Domitian’s darkening mood as his reign proceeded had serious implications for anyone in the senatorial elite. People whom the young Spaniard knew, or certainly knew of, faced exile and execution, in large part through the law courts.

The Roman state had no public prosecution service or anything resembling a modern police force, so the legal system depended on a private citizen laying an accusation that some other person had committed an offense. He was called a
delator
, a denouncer. Often the matter concerned him directly, and he would either prosecute the case himself or commission an experienced advocate to do so on his behalf.

As already discussed, an upper-class Roman received years of training in oratory. Many launched their political careers as young men by initiating prosecutions in the public interest—for instance, against embezzling governors at the end of their terms. The most brilliant speakers, such as Marcus Tullius Cicero in the final years of the Republic, were in great demand, whether for the prosecution or the defense.

Gradually there grew up a class of advocate who made a regular, one might say “professional,” practice of informing against and prosecuting people on serious or capital charges. They flourished, for emperors found them useful tools with which to eliminate their opponents. Denunciations were accepted from every socioeconomic class, even slaves, but the
delatores
who were also advocates and were capable of prosecuting as well as naming their victims usually came from leading circles. They made large fortunes from their trade: if they attached
maiestas
, or high treason, to the list of charges, one quarter of a convicted man’s assets went to the prosecutor. Domitian relied on men like this to terrorize the senatorial elite, and especially members of the Stoic opposition, under cover of judicial propriety. Juries, made up of senators, were likely to convict when they sensed that the emperor approved or had even provoked the prosecution.

But being a
delator
was not without its dangers. If a case failed, then he was subject to the same penalties as the accused. What is more, he was likely to be pursued in the courts on other charges by his victim’s vengeful relatives or friends. One such was Baebius Massa. He served as governor of Baetica (and may have been in office during Hadrian’s visit to his estates there in 90), where he acted so corruptly that the locals brought charges against him. He was arraigned in Rome before his peers in the Senate, which commissioned two of its members—Herennius Senecio, a native of Baetica himself, and the younger Pliny—to lead the prosecution. This was a great state event and, as a senator’s son, Hadrian had the right to attend; if we bear in mind the Baetican connection and his interests as a leading landowner, he very probably did.

The case seems to have been straightforward. Massa was convicted, and his assets were frozen while compensation for the Baeticans was assessed. The consuls objected and quietly unfroze them. But this contradicted
a senatorial vote and, when he learned of this unusual move, Senecio, supported by Pliny, protested and the consuls swiftly revoked their decision.